the age of privilege and warring against the coalition of kings, the cry of the Republic one and indivisible was a trumpet call to death or victory.  Any shifts, even that of a dictatorship, were to be borne, provided that social equality could be saved.  As republican Rome had saved her early liberties by intrusting unlimited powers to a temporary dictator, so, claimed Rousseau, a young commonwealth must by a similar device consult Nature’s first law of self-preservation.  The dictator saves liberty by temporarily abrogating it:  by momentary gagging of the legislative power he renders it truly vocal.

The events of the French Revolution form a tragic commentary on these theories.  In the first stage of that great movement we see the followers of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau marching in an undivided host against the ramparts of privilege.  The walls of the Bastille fall down even at the blast of their trumpets.  Odious feudal privileges disappear in a single sitting of the National Assembly; and the Parlements, or supreme law courts of the provinces, are swept away.  The old provinces themselves are abolished, and at the beginning of 1790 France gains social and political unity by her new system of Departments, which grants full freedom of action in local affairs, though in all national concerns it binds France closely to the new popular government at Paris.  But discords soon begin to divide the reformers:  hatred of clerical privilege and the desire to fill the empty coffers of the State dictate the first acts of spoliation.  Tithes are abolished:  the lands of the Church are confiscated to the service of the State; monastic orders are suppressed; and the Government undertakes to pay the stipends of bishops and priests.  Furthermore, their subjection to the State is definitely secured by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July, 1790) which invalidates their allegiance to the Pope.  Most of the clergy refuse:  these are termed non-jurors or orthodox priests, while their more complaisant colleagues are known as constitutional priests.  Hence arises a serious schism in the Church, which distracts the religious life of the land, and separates the friends of liberty from the champions of the rigorous equality preached by Rousseau.

The new constitution of 1791 was also a source of discord.  In its jealousy of the royal authority, the National Assembly seized very many of the executive functions of government.  The results were disastrous.  Laws remained without force, taxes went uncollected, the army was distracted by mutinies, and the monarchy sank slowly into the gulf of bankruptcy and anarchy.  Thus, in the course of three years, the revolutionists goaded the clergy to desperation, they were about to overthrow the monarchy, every month was proving their local self-government to be unworkable, and they themselves split into factions that plunged France into war and drenched her soil by organized massacres.